For the first time in TV history an art festival will take place exclusively on TV: From the 6th to 29th September 2013, the ikono On Air Festival will air a daily program of international video art, featuring artworks from highly celebrated established and emerging artists.
The festival will present contemporary perspectives on film, video
art, and other time-based art forms from the last decades which will be
supported by a program of video clips profiling art from antiquity until
today.
To celebrate this, we have an amazing evening planned on September 6 at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. The evening takes off with the launch of the official public screening of the festival program, projected on the Panoramic windows of the .CHB.

Joining us for this event will be live DJ act Miguel Toro, feat. guest Aerea Negrot!
* The ikono On Air Festival will be broadcast from 6 September to 29
September in over 30 countries and will also be available online via the
ikono livestream. You can be a part of the festival from home, from one
of our festival touch points, or one of our broadcasting partners.

Program

Official Opening and Public Screening of the ikono On Air Festival
Friday 6 September:
20:00 – Public screening of the festival program on the panoramic windows of the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, Dorotheenstraße 12 · 10117 Berlin · Free admission
21:00 – Presentation of Binoculars, an interactive installation by Mar Canet and Varvara Guljajeva, in collaboration with Public Art Lab and Connecting Cities.
22:30 – After party with live act Miguel Toro, feat. Guest Aerea Negrot
* The public screening and Binoculars will be repeated 7 September, same place, same time.

Just a few days left to ikono’s very first on air and online art
festival. Get ready to celebrate this pioneering moment in TV history:
from the 6th to the 29th of September you can watch more than 200 hours of video art. The daily program will feature artworks from established and emerging artists from
all over the world. The festival will present contemporary perspectives
on film, video art, and other time-based art forms, exclusively
broadcasted on TV and on live stream. Wherever you are, you can now
become part of a global community of art lovers.
Stop by the festival blog and sign up to the newsletter to receive the latest news about when the live stream will be available.

Festival program

The ikono On Air Festival presents a three weeks program with art
films and videos as well as other time-based art forms thank to the
participation of more than 100 artists from over 30 countries. A
retrospective of ikono’s video clips will complete the festival program
organized under the following themes:Time
Time presents a program dedicated to artists who respond to, reference
and explore the complex and enigmatic element of time. -> More info and list of artists in this section(Un)Boxed
This section is exclusively dedicated to works originally created for
the medium of TV. Starting in the 1960’s and marked by the artistic
debate around the square format of the TV, (Un)Boxed moves to the
present. -> More info and list of artists in this section

Time

Time and its presence in video, media and performance work can be both
literal and abstract however it will always exist as a definitive
element in these unique artforms.
Alaskan born artist Reynold Reynolds use of time is
direct. His work, often revolving around characters or physical matter
trapped and subject to the processes of metamorphosis (Solid / Liquid,
Fire / Water, Life / Death) and decay by time, expertly uses stop motion
animation to create dark worlds set to a constant heartbeat rhythm. Alexander Ponomarev’s use of illusion in Maya: A
Lost Island (2000) addresses the coexistence of mythology and technology
in the world around us. The work begins with the artist himself
scratching out an island from a nautical map, while the 5 t fleet of the
Russian navy, for a moment in time, “physically” erases an island from
the world with a “smoke screen”. A video artwork as a report of an event
or a moment in passing can disassociate itself with any truth and still
be believed. One of the powers of the moving image is that it is
romantically connected to trust, even in moments of complete disbelief.
Documentation of an event is equally the basis of a work by Austrian artist Hans Schabus.
In the 78 minute video work Laßnitz (2012) a bridge is sent on a 1000
mile long journey from Austria to the village Ohne, in Germany, where
Schabus declared it to be a sculpture from then on. The cathartic and
beautifully shot videowork is more about the effort and struggle to
place this object in a seemingly obscure field; providing a reflection
on the act of art making itself. Alexander Schellow premiering a new work for the
ikono on air festival directs his interest to memory and the physical
loss of environments and objects over time. In this work Schellow
explores a river lost to urbanization, climate change and other
situational factors through the use of animated drawings. The artist
spent days walking in Athens Greece talking with residents located
around the repurposed riverbed. Intentionally not recording any of these
conversations he waits until night recalling from his memory and
transcribing these thoughts into pictorial form. Time will move beyond
the obvious connections to the ticking clock, dedicating instead a
program to artworks exploring the perceptive and philosophical
experience of time, place and existence”.Selected Artists:Alexander Schellow (Germany) – Catherine Gfeller (Switzerland/France) – Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Finland) – Elisabetta di Sopra (Italy) – Hans Schabus (Austria) – Henning Lohner (Germany) – Orit Raff (Israel) - Sæmundur ﬁór Helgason (Island) – Alexander Ponomarev (Russia) - Reynold Reynolds (USA) – More to be announcedImage by Orit Raff

(UN)boxed

During the (UN)Boxed programmed sections we will
discover the changing aesthetics and progressive nature of video and
media art, focusing on how and where it is seen, as well as what it
looks like, and how this has evolved. Beginning at an important moment
in video arts short history, the introduction of the Sony Portapak, we
will see how technology has influenced the way artists create and
exhibit their work. The introduction of the Portapak was significant as
it created the opportunity for individuals, as opposed to production
teams, to work with the moving image. Through Deserts (1994) one of many works by Bill Viola
screening during the ikono on air festival we get a sense for Viola’s
connection to the technology he uses. The way that he masses content
into selective motifs and repetition of imagery from different times and
places shows a radical shift in production style from film to video. In
his early videoworks this shifting nature of what the moving image can
look like is perhaps characterized by the artist making the choice what
not to record rather then what to record. More recently there have been
numerous groundbreaking revelations in both media capture and video
presentation. What media and video art can be and look like has changed
radically. The screen has left the boxed television display of the 90’s
and is increasingly hard to define.
The screen has become enigmatic and omnipresent, In Finnbogi Peturssons
installation works he often uses light projection onto water that is
being disturbed by sound waves. The resulting image is reflected and
projected onto the gallery walls around it, creating a constantly
evolving, all encompassing artwork. Art has also left traditional brock
and mortar institutions, artist are using new social tools around them
to connect with wider audiences. Joe Hamilton’s Hyper Geography (2011) was
first exhibited online and uses a style and aesthetic found on image
blogs and argumentation websites. He easily creates fantastic imagined
landscapes that are repeatedly opening up to expose new worlds within
themselves. (UN)Boxed will take you through the arc of
historical technical developments, screening artworks that respond
directly to the technology available to them at the time or using
technology to speak of a specific period or place. Selected Artists:Bill Viola (USA) - Anthony McCall (USA) – Joe Hamilton (Australia) – Hans Schabus (Austria) – Kite & Laslett (UK) – Finbogi Peterson - More to be announcedImage by Joe Hamilton

(Re)Animate

Artists giving new life to existing, found and archival material as well
as popular visual languages and clichés to create independent new
artworks will be featured in this program dedicated to the reanimation
of the world around us.
In Marcel OdenbachsLife as a dead rabbit on the ice sandbank
(1980) the use of television sounds and visuals as well as scenes from
the student opposition movement (APO) intercut with his own surroundings
and images of his eyes, create a reflective construct of truth,
fiction, public and private.
As well as the inclusion of artist social constructs and important
events in their work (Re)Animate will explore (he productions of artists
who look inwards towards the artistic materials and technologies
themselves as a starting point for their artistic output. Robert Breer’s work Blazes (1961), a
representative work of the american avant-garde, is an experimental
abstract film where the artist created marks and colour sequences by
directly applying paint and chemicals to the surface of celluloid film.
The process applied to the medium is a direct way of creating images
without the use of the camera.
Emerging Italian artist Giulia Giannola will screen her visually stunning videowork Tinker tailor soldier sailor
(2012) taking the name from a rhyme born between 1475 and 1695 in Great
Britain before the Industrial Revolution. As children counted seeds,
rocks and petals they would recite the ryhme one word at a time: the
word spoken on the last object would guess their future job. In
Giannolas film an assembly line of workers perform repetitive tasks
extracting seeds from watermelons. Every character in the videowork has a
task amounting to one single action however the factory seamingly
produces nothing.
During (Re)Animate programs an important focus will be placed on
artists exploring political and social responsibiltites through their
visual mediums. Selected Artists:Pilar Mata Dupont (Australia) – Larissa Sansour (France) – Ma Qiusha (China) - Ori Gersht (Israel) – Sæmundur ﬁór Helgason (Island) – Tracy Valcarcel (Peru/Canada) – Marcel Odenbach (Germany) - Giulia Giannola (Italy) – More to be announcedImage by Giulia Giannola

Sublime

Video, media, sound and performance works that captivate audiences with
aesthetic seduction will be screened during the Sublime program. Ideas
behind the works in this section are portrayed through generating
personal emotional responses and often appear as visceral poetic
journeys.
Dutch artist Misha De Ridder creates slowly changing
epic landscapes borrowing the aesthetic qualities from nature
photography. Portraying simple natural phenomena curiously estranged,
they appear as unreal realities. Two 50 years old males having emotions (2013) by Ivan Argote
presents a bizarre long-playing scene of two 50-year-old men hugging
each other with deep passion. The work, a construction of the human
condition, is simply and beautifully produced, creating a meditative
response to masculinity and domination.
Iraqi born artist Jananne Al-Ani’ highly accomplished videoworks Shadow Sites I (2011) Shadow Sites II (2011)
is created by capturing Middle Eastern landscape from above with 16mm
film. She states ”Part of the appeal of using the dual technologies of
flight and photography in this project lay in the possibility of the
landscape itself exposing signs of survival and loss and becoming the
bearer of particularly resilient and recurring memories.” The piece is
characteristic of artworks in this section, that present important
political or social issues in a slow, contemplative and most importantly
in a aesthetically sublime way.Selected Artists:Adad Hannah (Canada) - Ange Leccia (France) – Brian Eno (UK) - Misha De Ridder (the Netherlands) – Pekka Sassi (Finland) – More to be announcedImage by Misha De Ridder

Australian artist Joe Hamilton uses technology, the Internet and found
material to create intricate and complex compositions online, offline
and somewhere inbetween. He is best known for Hyper Geography, a short
film and a tumblr collage blog
with 100 posts in a loop which are linked horizontally and vertically.
The ikono On Air Festival will show two of his films, “Hyper Geography”
and “Survey”, but the work goes beyond the screens and expands on the
Internet where it can be easily shared and spread around. Joe told Rhizome:
“I started in April of this year and, in a way, finished in August. I
am working on a script that will once a day take the last post in the
loop and reblog it. Then I will leave it. Or not. I’m not sure. In
selecting the images I was looking at our notion of environment and the
changing and overlapping definitions of natural, built and networked
environments. I gathered images that speak of these definitions and
blended them together in to new compositions. An attempt to create a
feeling of some type of hybrid environment, a hyper geography.”

Joe Hamilton describes his Tumblr with a quote: “What in the history
of thought may be seen as a confusion or an overlapping is often the
precise moment of the dramatic impulse.” — Raymond Williams, “Ideas of
Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture. (London: Verso, 1980).In an interview with Hyperallergic,
Hamilton said he “chose Tumblr primarily because it was where I
discovered the online art work that initially inspired me. I stumbled
across blogs like ‘Visual-Aids’ and other tumblelogs in the R-U-In?S
network, and they instantly got my attention.”
“The idea that content could and should move easily from blog to blog is the most appealing part of the platform for me,” he told Complex.com. In an interview with Creators Project
Joe Hamilton said: “A primary aim when making my work is to assemble a
composition that feels right visually. I look at things like value,
color, texture, pattern, unity, etc. and just keep working until I’m
happy with how it looks. The content is obviously very important too,
but I tend to think about that less when I’m composing the work. I have a
tendency to make my working process overly complex, which is often
frustrating, but in the long term this has taught me to deal with
complexity well.

Hyper Geography

The film accompanying the hyper geography blog is only one minute long
and it only provides a glimpse of what Hamilton is doing with his
virtual environment puzzles.Frieze Magazine described Joe Hamilton’s video Hyper Geography (2011)
as “a slow-motion flight over mountains, polar seas and deserts whose
contours dissolve again and again, overlaid with still images,
accompanied by the sounds of wind, water and birdsong. There are surface
structures and indefinable patterns or grids, superimposed on mountain
ranges and ice, desert sand and canyons, merging with them to form a
semi-synthetic and sublime landscape.
The landscape becomes a dense, inextricable jungle of fractal patterns,
visual noise, images of hands, faces, eyeballs, robots, cameras, all
manner of digital gadgets, contorted architecture and, again and again,
plants, leaves, grass, sky, mountains and minerals. In terms of
perspective, the whole thing is so complex, so fraught with tensions,
that there is no longer any outside, no beginning or end, and no
horizon. The images all stand out on the surface of the screen, their
various visual axes adding up to a strange mixture of smooth,
all-encompassing and ornamental depth – as if Arcimboldo’s nature
compositional portraits were mixed with M.C. Escher’s tessellations and
Thomas Bayrle’s infinite patterns. Central perspective is displaced by a
bewildering but inclusive multi-perspectivity which favours, not
overview, but immersion. The only way to ‘look behind’ is by clicking on
the images, only to discover others.Joe Hamilton – Trouble in Utopia

As the ikono On Air Festival
is moving closer it’s about time to have a closer look at some of the
more than 100 artists participating and one of them is obviously Misha
De Ridder, our artist of the month August. We are quite happy to be able
to show you some films by this incredible Dutch photographer, who has
taken pictures all across Alaska, Norway, and Switzerland, which capture
the last few untouched environments left on this planet and the natural
rythmn of the landscapes.
Sometimes natural phenomena can become so estranged and mysterious,
that we are inclined to describe them as unreal realities. It might be
the extraordinary shape of a tree, a mountain, a shadow, a cloud or the
mirroring reflection of nature in a lake, but it is foremost the
unfamiliarity of the natural aesthetics of reality. Misha de Ridder’s
works can be seen as attempts to capture these temporary phenomena and
atmospheres of nature within the still medium of photography. By seeking
for the absence of human intervention, by waiting for the climax of the
temporal aesthetic and by pushing the camera to its technical limits De
Ridder’s photographs become both exotic reports as autonomous
artificial worlds.

“To search, to disclose and to write with light is what Misha de
Ridder does in his landscape photos and videos. He does not seek the
comfort zone of the beautiful and picturesque, but the sublime. It is a
quest for entering into a confrontation with nature as a given larger
than ourselves, to re-visualize a greatness that is both realistic but
also inconceivable. Landscape is a paradox: how can we hold as an image
what perhaps can’t be photographed, the change of light for example, or
the tactility of the landscape. The greatness lifts us beyond borders we
are not always able to comprehend, not mentally, nor in feeling.
Landscape is not only seen, but is a multi-sensory experience with
knowledge and craft.”
- Professor Erik A. de Jong, opening speech ‘Solstice’ FOAM, 2011“As an artist, De Ridder makes images that could easily become
saccharine calendar art or empty exercises in sublime kitsch. Arctic
sunsets, verdant dunes and dense forests have all been De Ridder’s
subjects, but he has always succeeded in pushing them to a new level and
forced us to look again – either through inventive design in the case
of Wilderness or editorial restraint and focus, as in the case of Dune.
In some ways, De Ridder’s works are so forcefully anachronistic that
they are contemporary. It takes a brave and talented soul to tackle the
sublime landscape and succeed like De Ridder.”
- Adam Bell, PhotoEye Magazine, 2011

On Air: Misha De Ridder

The ikono On Air Festival will present four films by Misha De Ridder:Golden (10:47 min)
During sunset the changing of the light becomes tangible.Asgard (8:29 min.)
Storm clouds shadow play.White Silence (8.01 min.)
After the snow, mountains slowly reveal.Raftsundet (4.55 min.)
Dissociation from the wild.Misha De Ridder said in an interview for Dazed Digital that
he “was influenced by the German Düsseldorfer school: Andreas Gurski,
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff, etc. Later I moved away from them
because I think they have too much distance to their subject. I want
people to have the feeling that they are in the landscape when they look
at my work, it has to be about experience, that somehow you connect.
Also American photographer William Eggleston was an early inspiration –
Hiroshi Sugimoto is great, especially the seascapes from 7 days / 7
nights. Mostly I like painters, seventeenth century Jacob van Ruysdael
is fantastic, but also Gerhard Richter or Soll Lewitt and lots and lots
more. There is so much great painting. Part of me is also rooted in land
art, take for example James Turell’s project Roden Crater, the idea of
modifying a volcano only to sculpt how the light falls in the interior,
the sheer scale of that. Regarding film, Werner Herzog is a favourite,
not to forget David Claerbout.”Misha de Ridder (1971, Alkmaar, The Netherlands) lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
De Ridder exhibited at Juliètte Jongma Gallery, Layr Wuestenhagen
Contemporary, PhotoEspaña, the Triennial of Photography Hamburg,
Noorderlicht Photofestival, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Foam photography
museum Amsterdam, The Museum of the City of New York. -> Homepage of the artist

Utilizing both photography and video, Orit Raff has investigated objects
of domestic life—soap, bathroom floors, drains—in a search for traces
of the bodies that come into contact with them. This highly
self-reflexive practice often results in what appear to be vast, austere
landscapes. In her looped video/performance Palindrome (2001), a female
protagonist obsessively stacks felt within the domestic structure of an
igloo in a fraught allu-sion to the attempt to keep warm. This futile
gesture is made all the more absurd by its juxtaposition with foot-age
of a coyote comfortably navigating a frigid landscape.

Bio

Orit Raff attended Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem,
graduated cum laude from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and
participated in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of
American Art from 1998-1999. In 2003, she completed an MFA at Bard
College.
Raff’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe, Israel, and the
United States. In 2011 she participated in the exhibition “Videosphere: A
New Generation” at the Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY and in 2008
participated in the ex-hibition “True North” at the Deutsche Guggenheim,
Berlin
Her work is part of major collections such as: CU Art Museum, University
of Colorado at Boulder, Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY, The Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, TX, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv, Israel In November
2014 Raff will have a solo exhibition at the Tel-Aviv Museum.

On Air: Orit Raff

The ikono On Air Festival will be showing:Palindrome (2001, 16 mm color film transferred to video with sound)
The Film “Palindrome”portrays two repetitive images that in the end
converge into one: the artist performing a Sisyphean task- trying to
warm herself, and a coyote running in a snowy landscape. Meaning is
deliberately kept ambiguous and multifaceted.

Books:

Videos:

Orit Raff, Sweating Sweet, 2008

Abdominal Syndrome – Thoughts on Orit Raff’s Sweating Sweet by Yair Barak
Raff’s Character in Sweating Sweet is hardly one of us. Her appeal is one of a stranger.
Barefoot she is walking, wearing a dress, (more likely an apron) with sort of a pocket – an additional abdomen.
As an unknown marsupial she delivers an endless supply of white powder.
As a metabolic by-product the powder is being thrown away and constantly
(so it seems) – reproduced.
Salt or Sugar? The piece does not offer a definite answer. The title
though, implies for the sugar. If that is so, the contemporary sower is
spreading seeds of sweetness into the ever salty water of the ever
non-sweet sea. A one man desalination plant, made of cloth and sugar, no
pumps, no engines, activated by an urge for compensation, for
correction and contradiction.
The action/labor is a repeating ritual, a Sisyphean task, trying to
transform the salty sea water to sweet water i.e. in Hebrew drinking
water. This action has no purpose but the object of the act. The urge to
change the destiny, to take over, to interrupt the established order is
an act of rebellion and obedience at the same time. Raff’s character is
obsessed with shifting the rules in order to create a balanced reality
in which there is less gap and contradiction. This is of course, the
beginning of the end; the unavoidable recipe of failure.
We are led to the corrective system: Be good, correct, straighten
things, stay in the lines, do not freeze, and don’t let the sea be too
salty.
This is a mechanism of two layers: seduction and risk, naivety and awareness, attraction and restraint, rupture and repair.Orit Raff, Hunt-the-Slipper, 2002

“I feel more like a composer who likes to work in images, in
associations, repetitions, superimpositions, rather than a photographer
who isolates a single image. This enables me to include in the
composition some suggestion of how our visual-emotional-affective
perceptions work: with layers, flash-backs and disappearances.”
(CATHERINE GFELLER)

On Air: Catherine Gfeller

Catherine Gfeller combines still images and moving images to capture
her version of urban life, which penetrates public and intimate spaces
with its incessant pulsating. Silhouettes pioneer their way through the
beating, fragmented reality. The oscillating beat opens up a world of
deep thought. The soundtracks are speaking, whispering, breathing,
overlapping so as to create a mental state rather than delivering
information.
The ikono On Air festival is showing the following three of her films.Commotions II (2008)
The urban pulsations extend their impact in intimate spaces and seem to
invade our protagonists. Their gestures, their body, their quest are
intensified by the oscillating beat of the city. See an excerpt here. Vas à venir (2006)
While some people continuously pass by, covering others’ faces, bouncing
from spot to spot, others stay still to gather all theses movements on
one single reflecting surface. See an excerpt here. Listing (2007)
Perceptions of rishes become tactile and echoingSee an excerpt here. Pulses (2003)
Colored buses run through the city from on point to the other. From one
city to the other, the citiscape goes through buses and swallows
passengers.See a preview here.
Image on top of page from We find Wilderness: Les Dérangeuses #7. 70 x 94 cm

Bio

Catherine Gfeller was born in 1966 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She
currently lives and works in Paris and Southern France after having
lived in New York from 1995 to 1999. After her Master in Fine Arts in
1991 at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne, she devotes herself
to photography. She travels to many different continents (Europe,
Africa, Asia, South America, North America) to create large triptychs on
landscape (“A Matter of Landscape”). In 1995, she receives a grant for a
one-year residency in New York. There, she develops a printing
technique which combines paper, monoprint and photography on the theme
of urban landscape (“Urban Friezes”). In 1999 she is invited for a
residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and receives the
Photography Award from the HSBC Foundation. Paris inspires a new work
(“Multi-Compositions”), focused on metaphorical urban subjects using
various media: video, sound, the written word and radio productions.
Recently, intimate spaces and daily gestures create new multi-layered
compositions where urban rhythms still resonate, but in a more subdued
tone (“The Insiders”, “Chimeras”, “Domestic Pieces”, “Spells”).
Catherine Gfeller has exhibited extensively in Switzerland, France,
Italy, England, Holland, Germany, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, Canada and
the United States. Her work has been added to private and public
collections in Switzerland, France, England, Italy, Germany, Japan,
Belgium and the United States. She regularly takes part in art fairs,
such as ArtBasel, Kunst Zurich, Armory Show, la Fiac, Ljubjana Biennale
and Art Bruxelles.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a video artist and photographer
from Helsinki. Most of Ahtila’s works are focused on women going through
a traumatic experience, and most display multiple screens and vantage
points of the story, simultaneously. This mode of presentation
intentionally floods or overwhelms the viewer’s senses, sometimes
confusing one’s ability to follow and understand the narrative thread
intellectually, in order to produce a strong emotional impact. In her
recent films she focuses more deeply into individual identity and the
limit of the self and body in relation to the other.

On Air: Eija-Liisa Ahtila

The ikono On Air Festival is showing Eija-Liisa Ahtila ‘s film
“Fishermen (étude n.1)”, the first film from a series of studies or
etudes. Shot in West Africa it observes local fishermen attempting to
overcome the strong winds and big waves to launch their boats.

Videos

Eija Liisa Ahtila – Visual Artist

Eija-Liisa Ahtila is one of the leading contemporary video artists
working with video, photography, sculpture and drawing. Most important
to her is story telling and the variation and combination of time,
narration and space.
We met her at her great retrospective exhibition at the K21
Kunstsammlung NRW where her newest work “where is where” had been shown.Eija-Liisa Ahtila at Moderna Museet 2012

Panel Discussion: The Work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Eija-Liisa Ahtila. If 6 Was 9 (1995)

Image on top of page: Still from Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s “Fishermen (étude n.1)”

Bio

After completing her first degree in painting she began her Masters
in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Her videos and
installations intend to investigate the most sensitive dynamics of the
daily dimensions of life, expressing the hidden narratives within
everyday life. Behind the clean and minimal style of Elisabetta’s
videos, lays a hidden density of thought and a unique approach to
research. Most of them are focused on the female body viewed as an
embodiment of memory. The theme of motherhood plays a crucial role in
Elisabetta’s videos. As a digression from this topic, all of her works
speak to ideas of humanity, commenting on the cyclical movement of
everything that exists on a scale greater than the individual,
continuously renewing itself. The imagery is tied to the repeated sense
of being reabsorbed into the cycle of life and death.

On Air: Elisabetta Di Sopra

The ikono On Air Festival is showing the following films by Elisabetta Di Sopra:Temporary, 2013
In a house disappear one after the other and the furniture is emptied of
everything, including the owner of the house. Home and human figure are
both naked, losing all traces of the memory of himself and his own
identity.Impermanenze, 2013
The body as mimesis of space. And if the postures are precise and elegant, the place is timeless.Reaction, 2013
Performer: Laura Vio, Stefano Rota
It comes from a reflection on the human condition: the constant search
for balance. We do not just have to continually come up with new
strategies for survival not to “fall.”Aquameter, 2012
A young girl who, by pouring some water – image of life – from her mouth
into her mother’s symbolically restores the life she has received. The
gesture embraces the essentiality and meaningfulness of ordinary events
and encapsulates a broad range of interpretationsel with each other,
where the family should be a reassuring nest becomes a cage that
imprisons.Still from Aquameter, 2012Family, 2012
Within the family dynamics one becomes the hostage of the other. A quarrCon Tatto, 2012
When love is complicity involvement is completeStill from Con Tatto, 2012Somnium Coleopterae, 2012
It’s a kind of game. A kaleidoscope, where a small figure (Elisabetta Di
Sopra) floats together with its copies. Suddenly a bug breaks this
synchrony, causing a series of metamorphoses that will lead the
protagonist to become herself a bug. That bug will be then ready to fly
in a new kaleidoscope.

In Visibili, 2011
Essential things are often invisible. The aim is to consider the
presence / absence of women in the Italian history of the 19th century.Funny Show, 2009
The children are looking at us… and laugh.Light Water, 2009
A little girl swimming in water as dark as it was amniotic fluid, playing with a ball of light.Skipping, 2009
Rope jumping, a childish game that seems to have been forgotten by the
body… As in old age, when a person’s body is not a tool, but an obstacle
for existance.Sugar Dead, 2009
The body nourishes itself. It nourishes offering the first breakfast of
the world to the newborn child, to the loved giving himself, to the
mother coming back. Sugar dead is a work born from a reflection on
death, on the meaning of gift and offer. It’s a ephemeral sculpture
realized completely with sugar and thought to be consumed by and in the
Nature. Body that has finished to wish and to be wished and that now is
contemplated on his last offer. There is no drama but kindness in this
gesture: the whiteness of the sugar with its crystals suggests the idea
of dissolving, making reference to the concept of Nature that by dying
creates the beginning for a rebirth.Still, 2008
Still is a pause, a suspension condition that can endure forever… Like
the waves of the sea, the future and the past run after each other, wrap
themselves up, recur infinitely.Aria, 2008
A lightness deafening.The Crossing, 2008
A crossing ship, pictures that appear from the background and that appear inanimate. Then a flash…

Bio

Born in Watschig/Kaernten in 1970, Hans Schabus studied under
sculptor Bruno Gironcoli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he
is still living and working. His work has been exhibited in solo and
group shows throughout Europe as well as in the USA, Mexiko and Sri
Lanka. For his films he often works together with his brother, the
filmmaker Robert Schabus.

On Air: Hans Schabus

The films of Hans Schabus selected by ikono cover the artist’s
highlights from 2000 until today, representing three of his main
artistic aspects:
The artist’s sedulous effort and failure is addressed in Atelier
(2010) and Echo (2009). In Atelier Hans Schabus works with his own
studio space, which played a role in his earlier works already,
restaging the finale of Sam Peckinpah’s western classic The Wild Bunch
(1969). Echo is observing a man on the run through the mucky wetlands of
the Danube. The protagonist keeps falling into the mud, but continues
trying to escape from something or someone the viewer never gets to see.
Phantasmagoric journeys through the secret places of everyday life
are the themes of Passagier (2000), Western (2002) and Astronaut (2003).
For Passagier Schabus built an elaborate railway for a toy train with a
camera being led through the hidden spaces behind the walls of the
studio. In Western Schabus is rowing a sailing boat through the same
dirty Viennese sewer seen in the film classic The Third Man (1949),
while in Astronaut he is digging a shaft in the floor of his studio,
filling up the room with soil before exploring the dark world he has
created with his own hands.

Videos

HANS SCHABUS. LASSNITZ (Excerpt)

Laßnitz (2012), with 78 minutes the longest of Schabus’ films to be
on view on ikono, deals with the aesthetic transformation of a certain
object by decontextualizing and displacing it. The original proposal
simply read: »The work’s title is the name of the river, which was
originally crossed by the railway bridge.«This abandoned bridge is sent
on a 1000 miles long journey from Austria to the village Ohne in
Germany, where Schabus declared it to be a sculpture from now on. (There is a video with photos from behind the scenes over here by the way)-> Hans Schabus at Kerstin Engholm Gallery

Hans Schabus project was the next chapter in his ongoing series of
arrival photographs featuring the sailing boat Forlorn. The artist
produced a new photograph, titled ‘Europahaven, Rotterdam, 17 juni 2009′
which can be seen on a 5 by 9m roadside billboard on the way to
Maasvlakte, and was also distributed as a postcard, which was available
during a small exhibition of Schabus’ work at Futureland. In the new
image the sailor navigates towards the huge container terminals of the
Port of Rotterdam and a vast cargo ship. Sailing at a point which will
become the new entrance to Maasvlakte 2, the simplest of water vehicles
and a single man appear in stark contrast to an overwhelmingly modern
manifestation of seafaring trade. Despite the speed, scale and
efficiency of the port, the image seems to indicate that on a human
scale the vastness of maritime space nevertheless remains a vulnerable
and mythologically rich territory.Hans Schabus, Next Time I’m Here, I’ll Be There (2008)

Hans Schabus’ installation in the curve gallery at the Barbican, up
until 1 June. Schabus took chairs from various parts of the Barbican and
arranged in the configuration of an aeroplane – a cuvred one, on its
side…Big Art: Hans Schabus – Flight of Stairs (2012)

Sæmundur Þór Helgason is an Icelandic artist based in Reykjavik,
Amsterdam and London. Within his practice, Helgason investigates the
spatial and sculptural qualities of recording and presentation. His work
consists of place-dependent video installations where the
architectural- and the momentary context is depicted independently from,
yet in relation to what takes place. He designs and builds his own
recording devices in order to free the camera from the operator, giving
the camera its own path of depiction with its independent gaze and
interest.
He is a member of ‘hard-core‘, an Amsterdam and
London based artist-magnet that operates as a non-hierarchical and
non-authoritarian organization which aim is to attract critical thought
and facilitate discourse relating to artistic practices and the
surrounding philosophical- and socio-political matters. The group
develops curatorial methods that objectify preferential aspects of
exhibition-making that challenge the role of the art institution and the
economic pressure of the art market.
Helgason graduated form the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2012 where he was nominated for the Rietveld Fine Arts Award 2012.

On Air: Sæmundur Þór Helgason

We’re showing three films by Sæmundur Þór Helgason:90°CCW/CCWR (1)
A camera travels sideways at a counter clock wise 90 degree angle along
the walls of the exhibition space in a counter clock wise circular
movement. What is depicted is the final state of the exhibition space
including other works that the camera passes by. The recording is
presented on a 9 inch lcd screen placed on the floor facing upwards.Sweeping, Installing, Mopping (1)
While a camera hovers above the floor of an exhibition space and travels
simultaneously in a clockwise- and counter clockwise manner, the artist
sweeps the floor, builds up a screen on which the recording will be
played and at last mops the floor.Tourist (india)
A tourist video shot in Chennai, India. Some of the scenes are directed
by the artist while others are recordings of everyday life encounters.

A direct link to Sæmundur Þór Helgason

Other Videos by Sæmundur Þór Helgason

PIVOT POINT (2)

2012, HD video, 120 min continuous loop, without sound ( excerpt).
The work consists of a slow circular camera-movement where the camera
orbits and focuses on the point that it pivots. What is depicted is the
building-up process of an exhibition. The recording device is
electrically powered to maintain a constant speed. The tool that is used
for the recording is transformed and reassembled on the spot to
facilitate the presentation of the recording.
The work was recorded a week prior to the Gerrit Rietveld Academie
graduation show on the same days as the show was open. With a random
number generator the time of the recordings was chosen between the
opening hours of the show. Each day a 25 minute recording was made in
the center of a corridor of the fine art section of the show. On that
same spot the recordings were shown one after the other on a 7 inch LCD
monitor.FOREST

Hard-core session
HARD-CORE started in 2011 as an attempt to create an exhibition with six
individual artists. While seeking common ground, conversations about
each others work became the most important factor in these meetings.
Soon the decision came that the search towards core-elements of the work
was more important than rushing into a single moment of exhibiting.
These meetings where gradually baptized into hardcore, hard.core or
hard-core meetings.
The general rule of a hard-core meeting is that a certain amount of
time is spent on each work. Mostly a conversation takes about two hours
for every person. In this time it is up to the artist self what and how
much of the work is shown. Most of the times the works are still in a
pre- and rough state. These talks are not necessarily there to discuss
finished works. But, rather to dive into the artist’s intentions and
conceptual thoughts.
Question stayed how these different works would function altogether
in one space. Would it be possible and necessary to find conceptual
links. And if so, would it be needed to highlight these.
To trigger and inquire these questions HARD-CORE started to develop
curatorial systems. These methods challenges the notion of authorship by
leaving decisions to an objectified system.
While these meetings where overall rather private, throughout time
public moments became something to feed the discussion and a necessary
ingredient towards an artist practise. With having a public moment, such
as an exhibition, HARD-CORE wants to function as an Artist-Magnet. It
aims at creating polars of attraction for several fields in the realm of
art.
More at the-hard-core.euHard-core session with Sæmundur Þór Helgason 7th of March 2013

Influenced early on by philosophy and science, and working primarily
with 16mm as an art medium, Reynold Reynolds has developed a film
grammar based on transformation, consumption and decay. Detailed
evolving symbols and allusive references create a powerful pictorial
language based on Reynolds’ analytical point of view. His depiction of
people often makes us aware of the small frames we use to understand
reality. By subtly altering the regular conditions of life and watching
their effects, he transfers the experimental methods of science to
filmmaking, where he frames reality in his laboratory and changes one
variable at a time to reveal an underlying causality.

Bio

Reynold Reynolds was born in 1966 in Central Alaska. During his
undergraduate schooling at the University of Colorado at Boulder,
Reynolds studied Physics receiving a Bachelor’s degree under the
professorship of Carl Wieman (Physics Nobel Laureate 2001). Changing his
focus to studio art he remained two more years in Boulder to study
under experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. After moving to New York
City Reynolds completed an M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts.
In 2003 Reynold Reynolds was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation Fellowship and in 2004 invited to The American
Academy in Berlin with a studio at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien for one year.
In 2008 he received support from the German Kunstfonds to develop two
projects in Berlin. Reynolds has received numerous awards for his film
work, including the Festival Award for “Secret Life” at the European
Media Art Festival Osnabrueck, 2008, the ‘09 Distinction Award for “Six
Apartments” at Transmediale Berlin and Honorable Mention “Secret Life”,
at Chicago Underground Film Festival, 2012. Early 2013 he was awarded
the Rome Prize, an 11-month stay at the American Academy in Rome
2013/2014.

On Air: Reynold Reynolds

The ikono On Air Festival will be showing the following films by Reynold Reynolds:Secret Life (2009)HD video transferred from 16mm and photo-stills
Secret Life, the first part of the Secrets Trilogy, portrays a woman
trapped in an apartment with a life of its own. She moves at a
mechanical speed and her mind is like a clock whose hands pin the events
of her life to the tapestry of time; reflected in the mechanical eye of
the camera. Her thoughts escape her and come to life, growing like the
plants that inhabit the space around her: living, searching, feeling,
breathing and dying.Six Easy Pieces (2010)HD video transferred from 16mm and photo-stills, 1o min
Six Easy Pieces is the last part of the Secrets Trilogy; a three-part
cycle exploring the imperceptible conditions that frame life and is
preceded by Secret Life, 2008 and Secret Machine, 2009. The work is
based on the book “Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of physics explained by
its most brilliant teacher” by Richard P. Feynman ”Film is the Seventh
Art, a superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space (the Plastic Arts)
and the Rhythms of Time (music, poetry and dance), a synthesis of the
ancient arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry and
dance.” Burn (2002 with Patrick Jolley)HD video transferred from 16mm, 10:00min.
“Burn is a stunning evocation of those unspoken, those secrets, worries
and lies, forming a force which is always a part of the fabric of
everyday interactions; at first niggling at the edges, then – provoked
by a word or a gesture – suddenly searing through everything and
everyone in its path.”
- Belinda McKeon, The Irish TimesExcerpts of Secret Life, Burn and Six Easy Pieces

Six Apartments (2007)HD video transferred from 16mm and Super8, 12:30min
Six Apartments is a poetic document of decline and deterioration -both
physical and conceptual. Six isolated residents of six different
apartments live their lives unaware of each other. They eat their food,
wander between rooms, bathe, watch television, and sleep. For them, this
is life. Yet while it may appear that nothing is happening here, the
apartment building and its inhabitants’ bodies are aging, giving way to
bacteria, larva, and finally transformation.Reynold Reynolds on ‘Six Apartments’ at Transmediale 2009 – Tagr.tv

Interview: Peter SchlagerThe Drowning Room (2000 with Patrick Jolley)video transferred from Super8, 10:00min
“A sequence of domestic vignettes from the sunken suburbs. In the house,
the stagnant atmosphere has slowly thickened to liquid. The inhabitants
try to carry on as normal but beyond the borders of asphyxiation,
communication is limited and expression difficult. Filmed entirely
underwater in a submerged house to create an atmosphere unlike any other
film.”Last Day of the Republic (2010)HD projection transferred from 16mm, 10:00min
The Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) opened in 1976 as a
meeting place for the East German people and an emblem of the future.
The unique modern building made of distinctive golden-mirrored windows
was home to not just the East German Parliament but also auditoriums,
art galleries, five restaurants, concert halls, and even a bowling
alley.
The building’s dazzling public lobby, surrounded by several tiers, was
once the center of social life in East Berlin with thousands of
sparkling lamps filling the open space of the lobby’s grand
staircase. Many Berliners recall attending a play in one of the theaters
or dancing the night away in the underground disco, others seeing their
first rock concert, or being married.
Later, thousands of citizens demonstrated against the planned demolition
and hoped the building would be protected against historical
censorship, but alas, one day, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin
wall, the Palace completely disappeared.Istanbul (2005)Video transferred from Super8, 6:00min.
Installation with two screens about Istanbul.Stadtplan (2004)HD video transferred from Super8, 10:00min.
A personal and hypnotic, split-screen and time-lapsed trip through
Berlin, where the divide running down the images stands instead for the
long-separated country.Seven Days ‘Til Sunday (1998) – Reynold Reynolds with Patrick JolleyHD transferred from Super8, 7:45min
An autonomous symphony of falling bodies. A succession of image
sequences shows the human figure falling through the cityscape to- wards
violent annihilation by the natural forces of fire and water.

More videos by Reynold Reynolds

ON VIEW in Den Haag: ‘The Lost’- A Moment in TimeThe Lost is a restoration and film performance project about a
lost black and white feature length 16mm movie from the 1930s. Reynold
Reynolds has been working on this for a long time and in September The Hague will host the 7-channel installation of ‘The Lost’ (07.09.2013 — 06.10.2013 at Turbinehal, Den Haag). There are pictures from the set on Facebook over here and they are looking for volunteers for the big show in september. Watch the short documentary below!
Documentation from 2011 on the filming of The Lost

A compilation by Maud Chalard of her internship with Artstudio Reynold
during the preparation of the studio film performance for ‘The Lost’The History of the Future (USA 1996, 16 minutes)

A Review of our changing visions of the Future as shown in over 50 Films.
Reynold Reynolds create works that directly reference and use source
material from the Media in order to describe how the Media creates a
kind of ‘shared consciousness’ of how we come to understand our own
culture as well as anothers.
Screenings:
Central Florida Film Fest 97 Award: Third Place, Experimental
Chicago Underground Film Festival. Aug. 97
Ocularis Video Room Fest. Brooklyn May 21-23, 98
South Bronx Film & Video Fest, NYC 97
Sella Adler Theater: MoonWork: Best of New York Show May 25, 97
Knitting Factory Video Lounge NYC, Science Fiction night. July 25, 96Reynold Reynolds on the ‘Secrets Trilogy’ at Transmediale 2011 and Labor Berlin #4

HD video transferred from 16mm and photo-stills, single-channel 14min or 2-channel installation
Secret Machine is the second of the Secrets Trilogy; a cycle
exploring the imperceptible conditions that frame life and is preceded
by Secret Life (2008) and followed by Six Easy Pieces (2010)
In Secret Machine a woman is subjected to Muybridge’s motion studies.
She is treated in the same fashion as in the original Muybridge
photography: with Greek aesthetic in a Cartesian grid. A short time
after Mybridge’s studies, Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase,
No. 2 (1912) attempting to show time on a flat surface. He is expanding
cubism and painting into another dimension: time. Time is about movement
and change, like our experience of reality. Without change life does
not exist. Photography does not capture this experience. In Secret
Machine different filming techniques are compared to the motion of the
body. The film camera becomes another measurement tool in a way a video
camera cannot. The intention was to make an art piece from the point of
view of a machine, specifically a camera. Based on an Actual Event (USA 2003, 16 min, found footage)

“It is not only daily life which has become cinematographic and
televisual, but war as well. It has been said that war is the
continuation of politics by other means; we can also say that images,
media images, are the continuation of war by other means. Take
Apocalypse Now.”
-Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images
A three-channel video installation about the fictional portrayal of
American military forces in 20th century war. While each film simulates
an actual event, each new war simulates previous wars as shown in
popular films. Conceptions of war become reality through the depiction
of war as entertainment.Sugar (USA 2005, 33min video transferred from 16mm)

By Reynold Reynolds, Patrick Jolley, Samara Golden
A young woman descends into madness in a gripping one-hour looped
film by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley. That’s what seems to
happen, anyway, as the film’s nonlinear narrative and mix of grainy
black-and-white and lucid color tend to confuse what is real and what is
hallucinated or dreamed.
By turns funny, sad, mysterious and scary, the film’s events take
place in a squalid studio apartment. A young woman played by Samara
Golden arrives carrying a suitcase and begins cleaning up. At one point,
she extracts a corpse resembling her from behind a radiator screen and
tends to it as though preparing it for a funeral. In other scenes the
room violently shakes and water starts to flood it. Light bulbs pop and
overloaded electrical connections crackle and buzz. A man appears out of
nowhere and tries to rape the woman, but he quickly disappears. At
another point she mixes up a batter including roach powder that she had
put into a sugar container — hence, presumably, the film’s title ”Sugar”
— and eats it. Finally, she transfers her doppelganger’s body from the
refrigerator to the suitcase she came in with and departs.
Film students will detect references to famous movies — Roman
Polanski’s ”Repulsion” most conspicuously. But because Ms. Golden plays
her role with such understated earnestness, the film isn’t just an arch
exercise in appropriation. It immerses you in a harrowing dark night of
the soul.
-KEN JOHNSON (New York Times- December 23, 2005)
Music, J.G. Thirlwell;
Sound designers, Bruce Odland, Sam Auinger.
Actress: Samara GoldenNYC Symphony (USA 1995, 10 min.)

Video transferred from Super8
Personal Documentary in the style of the city films from the 1920′s.
US S-8mm Film Fest 96 Award: First Place, Audience
New York Underground Film Fest. March 97
New York University Cable Dec. 96
The Independents Vol. 1 No. 11. Ohio Television 97
Volcano Film Festival London, Special invitation. Nov. 97

Adad Hannah is known for beautiful, cleverly staged tableaux vivant
videos that often revisit or re-enact famed paintings and artworks.
Hannah has completed projects in diverse locales, with casts that often
challenge and update the meanings of the works he’s referencing. In
2009’s The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House), he recreated a famous Géricault painting using BC high-school students and treeplanters. The work was featured on ikono as part of the Echo series. Echo: The Raft of the Medusa – Adad Hannah after Théodore Géricault

Bio

Born in New York in 1971 and raised variously in Israel, England, and
Vancouver, for the last nine years multi-media artist Adad Hannah has
lived in Montreal, where he has pushed open the borders between the body
and installation art by fusing the two in thoroughly evocative ways.
Hannah combines video, photography and performance into tableaux
vivants. A multi-faceted exchange between art and history, Hannah uses
the space between the static body and the recorded motion to make
statements on the tension of our bodies’ natural dichotomies. Young and
prolific, in any given year his installations can be found around the
world, living in galleries as far and wide as Berlin, New York, Seoul,
or Australia.
In 2008, Hannah made a series of videos in Madrid’s Museo Nacional
del Prado that show visitors interacting with works in unusual ways.
Pieces, such as 2010′s The Russians (see below), are more documentary in
nature, providing extended “slice of life” scenes that still play on
the tension between moving and still images. Hannah has exhibited
widely, including at the Prague and Liverpool biennials.

On Air: Adad Hannah

The ikono On Air Festival is showing 15 films by Adad Hannah: Couple
Returning from the Supermarket, Cyclist Stopped on a Path, Girl on a
Balcony, Guitarist in a Hammock, Russian Woman at Home, Six Russians
Eating Ice Cream, Soldiers Resting, Teen resting on a Bench, Russian
KAMA3, Three Teens in the Countryside, Two Russian Couples, Two Sinks,
Two Workers and Young Couple at a Playground.

Awards

In 2003, Adad Hannah received an Honourable Mention at the 10th
International Media Arts Biennale. In 2009, he won the Canada Council’s
prestigious Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding artistic
achievement by a Canadian artist in mid-career. He has been longlisted
for the Sobey Art Award three times, and his work is in the collections
of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée des beaux-arts de
Montréal, among others.

Exhibitions

Adad Hannah has exhibited at the Samsung LEEUM Museum (Seoul 2011),
Prague Biennial 5 (2011), Museo de Bellas Artes (Santiago, Chile 2011),
5th International Video Art Biennial at the Israeli Centre for Digital
Art (Holon 2011), Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada
(Ottawa 2011), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Bucharest 2011),
Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney 2010), Liverpool Biennial
(2010), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2010), the Musée national des
beaux-arts du Québec (currently on view), the Musée d’art contemporain
de Montréal (2008, 2009), Zendai MoMA, Shanghai (2009), Galerie Thomas
Shulte (Berlin, 2008, curated by Christopher Eamon), Ke Center for
Contemporary Art (Shanghai 2008), the Vancouver Art Gallery (2007), Ikon
Gallery (Birmingham, 2006), the 4th Seoul International Media Art
Biennale (2006), Casa Encendida (Madrid 2006) and Viper Basel (2004). In
2004 he won the Toronto Images Festival Installation/New Media Award,
and the Bogdanka Poznanovic Award at Videomedeja 8. His work has been
funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des Arts et des
Lettres du Québec, the B.C Arts Council, the Vancouver
Foundation/Contemporary Art Gallery, the Quebec Delegations and Canadian
Embassies in Madrid, Seoul, and New York. He has produced works at
museums including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery
of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Rodin Gallery (Seoul), and
the Prado Museum (Madrid).

Bio

Ange Leccia
is a contemporary French painter, photographer, filmmaker and one of
the pioneers of video art in France. He works in Paris primarily with
photography and video. Since the early 1980s, his work has explored the
human dimension through the combination of light and images. Leccia was
born 19 April 1952 in Minerbio, Barrettali commune, in Corsica, and
studied the fine arts. Initially he was engaged in both painting and
photography, but as time passed he devoted himself more to photography
and video as his chosen media.
Leccia is a lecturer at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de
Cergy-Pontoise (ENSAPC). He also directs research for young artists at
the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Leccia’s first film was the short, Stridura, in 1980. In December 2004,
his film Azé, made in 1999, was released. Like his earlier work, such as
the shorts Île de beauté (Island of Beauty) (1996) and Gold (2000), both co-produced with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, in Azé Ange Leccia continued to stress the light and sound effects.
After transitioning into the photographic realm of the art world,
Leccia continued to succeed in leaps and bounds. His work has been
exhibited in several museums, some of which are the Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Le Pavillon

Apart from his evident immense artist talents, Leccia additionally is
a caring and nurturing individual, as since 2001 he has been managing
Le Pavillon. This establishment is a reseach unit that offers an
eight-month residency for around ten young artists and curators
recruited from around the world.
In 2010, Leccia went on to film Personne n’est à la place de personne with the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, as well as feature films Azé and Nuit bleue, both of which were presented at Rotterdam’s festival in 2010.On View: Ange Leccia, «Logical Song» (Until September 22th 2013)
For the MAC/VAL Ange Leccia has conceived a new work, a piece in which he evokes the important films in his life.

British-born avant-garde artist Anthony McCall occupies a space between
sculpture, cinema and drawing. He is known for his ‘solid-light’
installations, a series that he began in 1973 with his seminal Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in three-dimensional space.
Anthony McCall was a key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers
Co-operative in the 1970s and his earliest films are documents of
outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the
elements, most notably fire.Line Describing a Cone has long been a classic of American
avant-garde cinema, but because it was most often screened in dusty Soho
lofts in the past, the piece was little known to a wider audience. The
inclusion of Line Describing a Cone,1973 in the Whitney Museum of
American Art exhibition “Into the Light: the Projected Image in American
Art, 1964-1977″ has opened McCall’s work to a great deal of interest
both in America and abroad. While curators are only now beginning to
mine the history of the projected image in art, McCall continues to be
one of the most important of the Post-Minimalist artists to use
projected film.

On Air – Landscape for Fire

The ikono On Air Festival will be showing “Landscape for Fire” (1972,
16 mm), one of McCall’s sculptural performances based on a precisely
calibrated grid of small fires.

For Landscape for Fire, Anthony McCall and members of the British artist
colla-borative Exit followed McCall’s pre-determined score to torch
containers of flammable material across a field. McCall describes it:
“Over a three-year peri-od, I did a number of these sculptural
performances in landscape. Fire was the medium. The performances were
based on a square grid defined by 36 small fires (6 x 6). The pieces,
which usually took place at dusk, had a systematic, slowly changing
structure.” The work brought the grid — a conceptual focus for many
artists in the 1970s and after — into a natural landscape, merging it
with the vagaries of outdoor space and fire.Image: Still from “Landscape for Fire”

On View: Anthony McCall – Crossing the Elbe

To mark the opening of IBA Hamburg’s presentation year, British artist Anthony McCall realized a light project for Hamburg Deichtorhallen, which is on view until March 22 2014. The project reimagines the »Leap across the Elbe«
in visual terms. Three searchlights project slender beams of white
light towards one another from three different locations – from the roof
of the SPIEGEL building next to Deichtorhallen in Hamburg Neustadt,
from the bunker in Wilhelmsburg, and from the Deichtorhallen –
Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg-Harburg, thus linking the Elbe island
with both the north and the south banks of the river. Over the year,
these three horizontal beams of light will progressively rotate their
angles of direction so that, one by one, all sections of the city will
become part of this symbolic leap.

Starting ninety minutes after sunset, Crossing the Elbe is
visible for 10-minutes every evening for a whole year in most parts of
the sky between Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Deichtorhallen – Falckenburg
Collection in Harburg.
The project is a collaboration between Deichtorhallen Hamburg and
IBA. It was realized by Tim Hupe Architects. You can share your thoughts
and images on a blog under www.crossingtheelbe.com.

Anthony McCall about CROSSING THE ELBE

BIO

Anthony McCall studied graphic design at the Ravensbourne College of
Art and Design, Bromley, Kent, England in the late 1960s and
experimented with film during that time. Today he lives and works in
Manhattan.
After moving to New York in 1973, McCall continued with fire
performances and developed his ‘solid light’ film series, conceiving the
Line Describing a Cone, in 1973. These works are simple projections
that emphasise the sculptural qualities of a beam of light.
At the end of the 1970s, McCall withdrew from making art. Over 20 years
later, he acquired a new dynamic and re-opened his ‘solid light’ series,
this time using digital projectors rather than 16mm film.
In October 2009, McCall’s work was featured in a solo show opening at
the Moderna Museet. This exhibition showcased Doubling Back (2003) as
well as a light installation entitled You and I, Horizontal (2005). Also
included in the show were a number of drawings illustrating varied
motions of light waves, which the artist refers to as “scores” of his
films.
Later in 2009, McCall was awarded £500,000 from the London 2012 Cultural
Olympiad to create a work consisting of a column of steam in Birkenhead
which was planned to be visible up to 100 km away.[6] In April 2013 it
was announced that the work would never be completed despite already
costing £535,000 In Fall of 2013, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
will host an exhibition of his work, entitled You and I, Horizontal
(II).

Videos

Anthony McCall. Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture.

From Berlin’s museum for contemporary art, Hamburger Bahnhof — Museum
für Gegenwart which presented the largest exhibition of McCall’s work to
date. The museum presented a selection of Anthony McCall’s works from
the past ten years. The historic central hall of the former railway
station had been transformed into a cinema space, filled only with the
the haze and the veils of light that are typical for McCalls unique
light installations, the so-called solid light films.Anthony McCall | Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart

A ‘solid-light’ film by Anthony McCall.

This film captures a recent presentation of Anthony McCall’s
ground-breaking 1973 work, Line Describing a Cone. Testing the
boundaries between cinema and sculpture, the work takes the form of a
projected white dot that slowly grows to fill the dark space with a cone
of light, immersing audience members in its field, to mesmerising
effect.Anthony McCall – 2012 Lecture: “Recent Work and Current Projects”

Kite & Laslett are a young creative practice of installation artists based in London who were our artists of the month in March 2013.
The duo; Sebastian Kite and Will Laslett, trained in architecture,
sound and music, specialise in producing architectural interventions in
the form of interactive installations. Their cross-disciplinary projects
fuse sound, light, film, performance and sculptural elements to
construct immersive experiential environments that challenge human
perceptions of space. Elementary to Kite & Laslett is the
phenomenological conception of engaging with architecture, creating
interventions through rigorous experimentation and exploration into
psychoacoustics and kinaesthetics.

Since graduating as architects in 2010 (Glasgow School of Art,
Westminster School of Architecture), Sebastian and Will established Kite
& Laslett, a creative arts and design duo in London. Whilst
constructing their own houses and studio inside the shell of a disused
warehouse, the duo established their practice. Their studio provides the
space and inspiration for rigorous experimentation and prototype
making. From technical drawings via engineering solutions through
construction to installation, and finally, photographic documentation,
the duo possess the skills to realise their ambitious ideas
self-sufficiently from concept to fruition. Inherent to their work is a
passion for precision, technical efficiency, inventive materials and
elegance.
Audiences have encountered their site-specific works in non-art
spaces such as churches, prisons, bunkers, railway stations and
warehouses, but also the white cube gallery. The artists have recently
exhibited in Berlin, presenting their dynamic sculpture Panoptic in the
former Women’s Prison in Kantstrasse for platform79 – the berlin project
09/12; kinetic laser installation Orbit + Candescence for curated art
event +-0 in derelict Postbahnhof, 11/12 and solo show Lichtspiel at
Import Projects Berlin, 02/13.

Links:

On Air: Kite & Laslett

The ikono On Air Festival is showing the following films by Kite & Laslett.Echelon (2012)
Echelon is a film made in response to the baroque interior of St.
George’s Church Bloomsbury, London. The film presents a frenetic spatial
augmentation of the church, manipulating perspective, scale and depth
to produce a rest-ructured architectural space within the cinematic
frame. Contrary to Kite & Laslett’s usual practice of producing
physical interventions in dialogue with architectural spaces, Echelon
portrays an inverse paradigm; the film itself becomes a cinematic
installation.
Recorded at night, flash photography was used to create 3,000 high
contrast images of the architectural features of the church. The removal
of colour in the film directly communicates the medium of light itself,
allowing the eye to dis-tinguish the disparity and spatial
foreshortening between one frame and the next. The rhythmic layering of
25 independent frames per second entrances the eye in a restless and
ever shifting architecture, transforming scenes of the familiar into a
mirage.Enclosure (2011)
Enclosure is an immersive sound and light installation, whereby the
audience interact with a specifically composed sound score in a
quadraphonic configu-ration in the spatial volume it inhabits. La Cura (2012)
Central to the choreography of La Cura, Kite & Laslett have produced
an octa-phonic sound and light composition that intensifies the
therapeutic atmosp-here of the performance and playful interaction by
the audience.Orbit (2012)
Orbit is a kinetic light installation designed for a former railway
tunnel. A series of rotors of increasing diameter and speed are
positioned along the 80m space, projecting laser beams into the void.
Their orbiting constellation tar-gets towards a circular plane at the
end of the tunnel.
The viewer follows the rays overhead, approaching the swirling red cells
ema-nating from the vanishing point. The churning rumble of the
revolving cogs re-veals a machine in perpetual motion. Orbit premiered
as part of a curated art and club event in Berlin in November 2012.Panoptic (2012)
For platform79 – the berlin project Kite & Laslett produced two
artistic inter-ventions. The first, Panoptic, is a physical
mobile-installation situated in Cour-tyard IV of the former Kantstraße
Women’s Prison, exploring visual space. In contrast, Klangzelle, a sound
installation, examines solely aural space and the acoustic energy of
the prison interior. The two works stand in relative juxtapo-sition to
one another, both architecturally and in conception.A Leap in the dark (2011)
A mystery surprise film.Reflex (2013)
Two projectors face one another, separated by a series of translucent
screens. The projectors call and respond in a chaotic and restless
dialogue, firing interlocking shapes and gradually becoming more
complex. The repetition of the projected image through the screens
transforms flat impressions, enlarging and giving the sense of physical
volume within the exhibition space.
Reflex is an experiment in the medium of dual-projection, spatialising
light itself; the immaterial presented as material. The installation is a
simple apparatus, yet allows scope for complexity in effect. The
interchangeable pace at which the spectrum of colours crossfade between
the projectors creates the sense of a parallel timescape; time slowed
down.Candescence (2010)
The installation is an array of acoustically responsive spheres
activated by sound and touch. Human interaction triggers an ascendance
of vision, light and sound in a cyclic loop of which the individual is
integral. The project explo-res the notion of psychoacoustics and
acousmatics applied in an architectural space. The sonic and radiant
atmosphere inhabits and alters one’s perception of the former Empress
Coach House space.GENIUS LOCI

IN SITU features three young artists whose work relates to the
architectural and the site specific. Kite & Laslett present Genius
Loci, an immersive installation that seeks to capture the spirit of the
Belfry through sound and light. Eleanor Wemyss presents Foundations, a
series of intricate architectural drawings based on original designs of
the building.
_____
Kite & Laslett’s Genius Loci draws on sound recordings made in the
Church interiors, where improvised acoustic experiments are incorporated
into a multi-layered sound piece and projected into the Belfry space.
The soundscape is experienced in near-darkness, asking the viewer to
contemplate the subtleties of the interaction between the sound
composition, light and their relationship to the space with limited
navigation.
The sounds have been de-contextualised and re-placed, causing
disorientation as to their original source, context and their
relationship to the Belfry. An example of this can be heard via the
spatialised deconstruction and abstraction of Anton Bruckner’s Locus
Iste – This Place. The installation is an experiment in kinaesthetic
experience, limiting the use of some senses and emphasising the use of
others, reconfiguring one’s orientation around the space.
Live performances took place at the Opening & Closing Views with a
live feed from the main Church hall to the secluded space of the
Belfry, connecting different spaces across the building and challenging
notions of ‘liveness’ and sensory experience.
Sound composition: Sebastian Kite
Voices: Toby O’Conner, Lara Karady, May Kersey, Damien Taylor
As part of IN SITU
02/02/12 – 01/03/12
The Belfry
St. John on Bethnal Green
London

Finnbogi Petursson is one of Iceland’s most prominent artists. In his
works he fuses sound, light, sculpture, architecture and drawings.
Petursson has also already been ikono’s artist of the month in July 2012.
Sound, a crucial element in his works, is literally shaping his work
out of thin air from its natural physical properties. Elemental in form
as well as content, Finnbogi’s starkly beautiful and powerful pieces
capture acoustic phenomena in water, wind, metal, and fire.
Sound itself is his primary material, typically incorporated into
spare sculptural installations that can involve multiple audio speakers
placed on the wall, the floor or within columns. The speakers emit
sequences of single tones that make what Petursson likes to call
“drawings”: forms consisting not of visible marks but of invisible sound
waves. Petursson’s sound sculptures often elicit a palpable sense of
mystery and discovery, suggesting an openness to the kind of
world-shaping powers that are especially evident in Iceland.
Pétursson represented Iceland at the Venice Biennial in 2001 with his
monumental sound installation Diabolus. He transformed the small
Icelandic pavilion into a large, tunnel-like “musical” instrument. Gregory Volk wrote
about this installation at the time: “Mixing medieval methodology and
up to date electronic technology, Pétursson’s work conflates past and
present, and his tunnel becomes a kind of time chamber, a conduit
between the centuries. Importantly, Pétursson has constructed his tunnel
in such a way that it is essentially a private experience for the
viewer/listener. In a crowded place, you are not in a crowd at all but
instead alone with this haunting sound which comes with a very powerful
cultural history.”
Collections include T-B A21, Vienna; Malmo KunstMuseum, Sweden;
Nordiska Akvarell Museum, Sweden; and the National Gallery of Iceland.
Permanent installations are at Landsvirkjun, Vatnsfellsvirkjun (an
electric power plant) Reykjavik University and the Reykjavík Energy
Headquarters. Finnbogi lives and works in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Pilar Mata Dupont is an interdisciplinary artist from Australia working
in film, photography, and performance. Her recent work explores aspects
of identity and nationalism (especially in militarised societies)
through the appropriation of memory, mythology, and history.Pilar Mata Dupont about her workIn my solo practice I am interested in re-creating or re-imagining
memories or histories based on fragments of texts, photographs or
people’s stories; exploring how memory/history can be disfigured or
glorified. At present I am experimenting with creating narratives,
through film and photography, as hybrids of various mythologies and the
memories relayed to me by people I meet while traveling. I am doing this
in order to create a sort of new world mythology, stripped of the
grandeur of the original myth, but bestowing a heightened reality and
meaning to ordinary memory. These experiments further my interest in
engaging with and subverting storytelling tropes, and resume my
investigations into the genre of magic realism as a device to explore
the effects of colonialism, nationalism, and militarised societies. At this time I am on a two year-long research trip during
which I am developing projects around the world, including stays in the
Netherlands, Germany, Finland, United Kingdom, Argentina, China, and
North and South Korea.

On Air – Pilar Mata Dupont

The ikono On Air Festival will be showing two films by Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont:Gymnasium

Ideas of the fascist aesthetic, it’s use in propaganda and the cult of
the heroic sportsperson in Australia permeate Gymnasium. “Fascism is
theatre,” said Jean Genet, so we have portrayed 20 athletes ‘performing’
various indoor gymnastic-like routines. Their movements are repetitive,
drone-like, made with the poise and perfection of an ancient statue of
Diana, and their smiles are like Ziegfeld’s girls in his 1920′s follies.
Indeed, the Nazi soldiers in the propaganda film, Triumph of the Will
(1935) by Leni Riefenstahl and her perfectly honed athletes in Olympia
(1938) are heavily referenced in this work.
We find that alluring visual effects of this kind of propaganda
suggest a sinister subtext; that the qualities valued in sport –
camaraderie, bodily and mental control, submissive behaviour and
endurance of pain – are also valued in militarised societies. We link
the sportsfield to the battlefield as a location for the demonstration
of legitimate patriotic aggression, and success in both as a source of
national pride. Through the display of these Australian replica sports
heroes using a tongue-in-cheek, fascist-styled aesthetic the fascist
nationalistic aggression is implied and transposed into Australian
culture.
Winning work for the 2010 Basil Sellers Art Prize. Avernus

In this work the artist experiments with creating a narrative as a
hybrid of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and various collected memories
associated with loss, and the moments leading up to the loss of a person
from one’s life, through death or another form of parting. The movement
was developed between the director and the two performers and was
designed to reflect the transient movements of water and the act of
washing/cleansing.
This work has been developed in collaboration between the CineB
Festival, Chile and MUBI. Working with the Nine Inch Nails album ‘Ghosts
I – IV’ and 36 international directors a feature film is currently
being created based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The feature film
is due for release in 2013 and will tour to London and New York.
More at festivalcineb.com

Videos

Working with WA composer Tim Cunniffe, Hold Your Horses (Thea
Costantino, Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont) have created ‘The
Soloists (a case study)’, a choral adaptation of Freud’s famous ‘failed’
case, Dora.
Dora is an eighteen-year-old ‘hysteric’ hopelessly entangled in the
destructive relationships of her family and their intimate friends.
Freud’s attempts to enact a cure are thwarted by Dora’s ability to elude
the analysis. In The Soloists, the testimonies of each character within
the case study compete within a sound world made entirely of human
voices.
The work was developed during a residency at the Fremantle Arts
Centre and presented in a solo exhibition at the Fremantle Arts Centre
from the 21st May – 17th July 2011.‘Ever Higher’ (excerpt) from Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont

This work was created with the support of the Western Australian government through the Department of Culture and the Arts.
Filmed on location at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.Interview: Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont (2010)

Born in Jerusalem, Lariss Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London
and New York. Her work is interdisciplinary, immersed in the current
political dialogue and utilises video art, photography, experimental
documentary, the book form and the internet.
Sansour’s work features in galleries, museums, film festivals and art
publications worldwide. Recent solo shows include Anne de Villepoix in
Paris, Photographic Center in Copenhagen, Sabrina Amrani Gallery in
Madrid, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, DEPO in Istanbul and Jack the Pelican
in New York. She has participated in the biennials in Istanbul, Busan
and Liverpool.
Upcoming shows in 2013 include the MuCEM in Marseille, the Bluecoat
in Liverpool, Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, Harlem Studio Museum in New York
and the Turku Art Museum in Finland.
Larissa is represented by Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris and Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai. She lives and works in London and Copenhagen.

On Air: Larissa Sansour

The ikono On Air Festival is showing Larissa Sansour’s “Space Exodus”.Excerpt from “A Space Exodus” (2009)

A Space Exodus quirkily sets up an adapted stretch of Stanley
Kubrick’s Space Odyssey in a Middle Eastern political context. The
recognisable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed
to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of Sansour’s film.
The film follows the artist herself onto a phantasmagoric journey
through the universe echoing Stanley Kubrick’s thematic concerns for
human evolution, progress and technology. However, in her film, Sansour
posits the idea of a first Palestinian into space, and, referencing
Armstrong’s moon landing, she interprets this theoretical gesture as “a
small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind”.
The film offers a naively hopeful and optimistic vision for a
Palestinian future contrasting sharply with all the elements that are
currently eating away at the very idea of a viable Palestinian state. In
A Space Exodus, Sansour does finally reach the moon, although her
contact with Palestine’s capital is cut off.
This five-minute short is packed with highly produced visual imagery.
The arabesque elements ranging from the space suit to the music are
merged within a dreamy galactic setting and elaborate special effects. A
great deal of attention is paid to every detail of the film to create a
never before seen case of thrillingly magical Palestinian displacement.
- A Space Exodus was nominated for the Muhr Awards for short film at the Dubai International Film Festival
- The artwork above, Floating, A Space Exodus by Larissa Sansour, is currently for sale at Lawrie Shabibi. Find comprehensive details on this artwork here.

Videos by Larissa Sansour

Nation Estate (clip)

Nation Estate is a 9-minute sci-fi short film offering a clinically
dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East.
With its glossy mixture of computer generated imagery, live actors
and arabesque electronica, Nation Estate explores a vertical solution to
Palestinian statehood. In Sansour’s film, Palestinians have their state
in the form of a single skyscraper: the Nation Estate. One colossal
high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population – now finally living
the high life. More here.SBARA

Heavily referencing the 1980 cult classic The Shining by Stanley
Kubrick, Sbara explores the castigation of Arabs in contemporary Western
dialogue.
By adding an audio montage combining historical and current quotes on
the Middle East to footage paraphrasing scenes from the original film,
Sbara seeks to expose the cyclical nature of Middle Eastern rhetoric and
policies and emphasize the psychological terror inflicted upon those at
the receiving end of this repetitively stagnant political discourse.Run Lara Run

This short video touches upon issues of identity and belonging. It
explores the idea of displaced identities, typical of societies that
have undergone political turmoil – and their diasporas. Cultural
hybridity is also called into question.Land Confiscation Order 06/24/T (excerpt)

A requiem for a small piece of land, Land Confiscation Order 06/24/T
explores the notion of territory as constitutive of not only national,
but also personal identity.Bethlehem Bandolero (excerpt)

Bethlehem Bandolero is a kitsch video featuring Sansour herself as a
Mexican gunslinger arriving in Bethlehem for a duel with the Israeli
Wall. Wearing a big sombrero and a scarf, the artist walks the streets
of Bethlehem and greets the locals before taking off for her final
showdown.
The editing is inspired by television effects from the seventies. The humour of the piece is stressed by the underlying music.
By fusing world crises and blatant absurdity, Bethlehem Bandolero
challenges the current dialogue on the Middle East by shaking its
conceptual foundations.

Frequently referencing art history, Ori Gersht’s imagery is uncannily
beautiful; the viewer is visually seduced before being confronted with
darker and more complex themes, presenting a compulsive tension between
beauty and violence. This has included an exploration of his own
family’s experiences during the Holocaust, a series of post-conflict
landscapes in Bosnia and a celebrated trilogy of slow-motion films in
which traditional still lives explode on screen.
In his evocative and innovative films and photographs, Ori Gersht
weds the past and the present. With the latest technology he takes a
discerning look at multiple histories and the ways they are
communicated: histories that have shaped his own identity and helped
define the state of contemporary society. Gersht’s images, with sources
ranging from 19th century still life painting to the Holocaust, reveal
the links between history and memory, creation and destruction, and
beauty and violence while exploring the passage of time.

Bio

Ori Gersht was born in Israel in 1967, but has lived in London for
over 20 years. Throughout his career his work has been concerned with
the relationships between history memory and landscape. He often adopts a
poetic, metaphorical approach to explore the difficulties of visually
representing conflict and violent events or histories. Gersht approaches
this challenge not simply through his choice of imagery, but by pushing
the technical limitations of photography, questioning its claim to
truth.

On Air: Ori Gersht

The ikono On Air Festival is showing three of Ori Gersht’s films: Falling Bird (2008)Courtesy of Mummery+Schnelle Gallery, CRG Gallery, Noga Gallery, Brand New Gallery, Angles Gallery
‘Falling Bird’, is based on Chardin’s still life painting titled ‘A
Mallard Drake Hanging on a Wall and a Seville Orange’. The film reveal a
hanging mallard, suddenly free-falling towards a mirror like black
surface, collapsing into its own reflection. On impact the bird
penetrates the liquid surface and in doing so triggers an epic chain
reaction, reminiscent of a geological disaster.
The film is part of a body of still life works, which are related to
seminal old masters paintings. In these works, Gersht explores
relationships between pho-tography and technology, revisiting
fundamental philosophical conundrums concerning optical perception,
conceptions of time and the relationships between the photographic image
and objective reality.Excerpt

The film allude to the inherent shadow of death and decay hanging
over old master still life and vanitas paintings. However, technology
has aided Gersht in creating contemporary versions, bringing the
concerns of still life masters into a contemporary context. By basing
his films and photographs upon paintings within the long-established art
historical tradition, Gersht draws attention to the painterly nature of
his work which closely resembles these iconic master-pieces. Yet they
are distanced due to the instantaneous digital process which translates
every second in reality to a minute on film in the case of the moving
image pieces and in the photographs, captures each shattering still life
at a speed of 1/3200 of a second and stores the information
immaterially as data on a harddrive until each is transcoded into a film
or fabricated as a C-Type print, returning the image to the world of
two-dimensional artworks.
Throughout this body of work peacefully balanced compositions become
victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction.
This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and
creation, is enhanced by the fruitful collision of the age-old need to
capture “reality” and the potential of photography to question what that
actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective
truth has been shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in
a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.Big Bang (2001)Courtesy of Mummery+Schnelle Gallery, CRG Gallery, Noga Gallery, Brand New Gallery, Angles Gallery
In Big Bang, Gersht explores relationships between photography/film
and technology, revisiting fundamental philosophical conundrums
concerning op-tical perception, conceptions of time and the relationship
between the photo-graphic image and objective reality.
The film depict and explosion of an elaborate floral arrangements based
upon 17th century Dutch still life paintings. Dependent upon the
advanced techno-logy the film depict an event that was inconceivable to
the old masters. This visual occurrence that is too fast for the human
eye to process and can only be perceived with the aid of technological
devices, is what Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconsciousness’ in
his seminal essay ‘A Short History of Photography’. Excerpt

Gersht´s film allude to the inherent shadow of death and decay
hanging over old master still life and vanitas paintings, complete with
moths hovering above the explosions. Technology has aided Gersht in
creating contemporary versions of frozen life, bringing the concerns of
still life masters into a contemporary context. By basing his film and
photographs upon paintings within the long-established art historical
tradition of still life painting, Gersht draws attention to the
painterly nature of his work, which closely resemble these paintings.
Flowers, which often symbolize peace, become victims of brutal terror,
revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction. This tension that exists
between violence and beauty, destruction and creation, is enhanced by
the fruitful collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the
potential of photography and film to question what that actually means.
The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been
shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in a more complex
and challenging manner have arisen. Extracts from Big Bang at Times Square, April 2012

Dew (2001)Courtesy of Mummery+Schnelle Gallery, CRG Gallery, Noga Gallery, Brand New Gallery, Angles Gallery
The video was filmed in the Negev Desert, the camera was stationary, and the entire film was created in a single shot.
While filming a Bedouin camp I realised that the viewing was obstructed,
when turning the camera to an auto focus mode, I figured out that the
obstruction was caused by condensation of dew drops on the lens. Since
the camera was focusing on itself the dew drops were sharp in focus.
I filmed the process of evaporation ( over 2 hours, which were later
compressed to a 4.5 minutes film). When the lens finally cleared up, the
camera automatically shifted it’s focus of attention to the background (
the Bedouin camp and the landscape).
The transition in this film is very slow, while watching, the viewer is
unable to detected the temporal changes, however, at the end, when the
film loops on itself the viewer is becoming aware of the visual journey.
Apart of its political and geographical evocation, the film is exploring
the relationships and tensions between the still and the moving image.

Videos

History Repeating: A Conversation with Artist Ori Gersht and Curator Al Miner

On the occasion of his first major survey exhibition, Ori Gersht:
History Repeating at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (August 28 –
January 6 2012), Gersht and exhibition curator Al Miner discussed
Gersht’s evolving body of work and the diverse threads of history woven
throughout his oeuvre. With a special introduction by Norman Kleeblatt,
Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum. In the Artist’s Words: Ori Gersht on Violence and Beauty

Ori Gersht: History Repeating published by Lund Humphries
in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the most
comprehensive survey of the photographs, films, and videos of the
Israeli-born artist to date. This richly illustrated book presents the
best of Gersht’s achingly beautiful work and explores how he intertwines
spectacles of painterly and narrative imagery with personal and
collective memory.

Individual and society, individual action and collective action are some
of the themes around which Giulia Giannola’s work circulates. The
italian artist just won the first Völklinger Art Award for “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor” (2012) which will also be shown as part of our festival program in September.
The video takes its name from the English nursery rhyme datable between 1475 and 1695,
sung by children in a counting game with buttons, flower petals, cherry
stones, pebbles or other objects in order to ‘determine’ their future
job: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man,
thief. Giannola converts the game into factory work, staging a human
production line intent on extracting seeds from watermelons. Each
individual has his role, mechanical, repetitive, punctuated by the
rhythms of the nursery rhyme which is recited by the last link in the
chain who is involved in counting the seeds. A reflection on work
conditions in a factory before the industrial revolution where the
workers act like mechanisms of an immobile engine. The selection of each
frame, the formal balance, the aesthetic care and the repetitiveness of
the rhythm exalt this work of Giannola who succeeds in transforming the
scene into a theatrum mundi in which we can all recognise ourselves.

Bio

Giulia Giannola was born in Naples in 1985. She studied Visual Arts
at IUAV University in Venice, where she began to work with performances
and video. After her degree she moved to Berlin where she is currently
studying at the Universität der Künste. In her performances she creates
choreographies, staged situations, and actions in public spaces to
reflect on the value of personal and collective time.Book: Referring to the unofficial twinnings that
reflect Berlin’s current immigrant population instead of the official
equivalents of the city, Invisible Twinning explores the city’s long
tradition of urban horticulture and reveals ideas of health in the
widest sense: as balance and imbalance as well as on a societal and
personal level, looking at how people navigate and share resources
within a city. Invisible Twinning was published as part of the Asia-Pacific-Weeks 2011 at the House of World Cultures in Berlin.Images: Video Stills from Giulia Giannola’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor (2012), Courtesy of e x t r a s p a z i o, Rome

Videos by Giulia Giannola

Show Reel

Timing

It’s a calm little place

Clock

Swimming Lane

This video deals with the theme “Time”.
In this video I played with different time levels.
The swimming pool divided in lanes is particularly suitable for this purpose.
Every swimmer has a different speed (natural speed, innatural slowness,
innatural quickness…). The resulting absurd and chaotic situation, can
be a metaphor for the collective time.
Despite chronological time is the same for all, everyone has its own “speed.Kochzeiten (Cooking Times)

On the May 20th, 2010 four actors paid 10 euros worth of supermarket
items with coins valued at 1 cent upto 50 cents at the supermarket Real
in Braunschweig. The aim of the action was to stop the flow of traffic
in the lines and record the behaviour of the cashiers and the people
waiting in line.
Some of them stressed, some of them resigned, and some of them offered
to pay themselves, in order speed up the process. In the performance,
money, which is conceived to accelerate commercial exchanges, ends up
causing the payment process to even go slower and stop the normal
flowing of operations.
The antropologue Marc Augé has defined the anthropological
“no-places” (supermarkets along with shopping-malls, hotel chains,
airports) as a category of places, mostly with commercial aims, where
people are often inserted into mechanisms, characterised by
standardised behaviours which they have learned.
The supermarket is a specific place which is part of a bigger system,
and influences our everyday life and its rhythms, and definetly defines
them.
Also see Elettrocardiodramma, experiment on collective life rhythms (1)
-> More at Giulia Giannola’s Vimeo Channelfestival blog:

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Shepard Fairey is the man behind OBEY
GIANT, the graphics that have changed the way people see art and the
urban landscape. What started with an absurd sticker he created in 1989
while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design has since evolved
into… Read More

For more than thirty years, Jenny Holzer
has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public
places and international exhibitions, including 7 World Trade Center,
the Reichstag, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York
and Bilbao, and the Whitney Museum of American… Read More

Matt Pyke (b.1975) is one of the most
innovative digital-motion artists of his time. Pyke’s body of work,
which explores the tensions between abstract and figurative form and the
synesthesia of sound and image, encompasses a striking diversity: it
ranges from interactive design and branded… Read More

British artist and filmmaker Doug Foster
(b.1961) produces large scale digital film installations that play with
symmetry and exploit the human eye’s susceptibility to optical illusion.
Foster has exhibited internationally, including at Works from the David
Roberts Collection, DRAF, London (2007); Only Human, The Fine… Read More

Bill Viola (b. 1951) is internationally
recognised as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental
in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and
in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of
technology, content,… Read More

Flatform - Quantum + Trento Symphonia + Movements of an Impossible Time + A Place to Come + Can Not Be Anything Against the Wind + 57.600 Seconds of Invisible Night and Light + Sunday 6th April, 11:42 a.m. + About zero + With Nature There Are no Special Effects, Only Consequences (f)

Ben Rivers - The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers (f)

Cheryl Frances-Hoad - Glory Tree (m)

Thomas Adès - The Twenty-Fifth Hour (m)

Daníel Bjarnason - Over Light Earth + Processions + Solaris (m)

Dobrinka Tabakova - String Paths (m)

Jacek Sienkiewicz - Nomatter (m)

Veli-Matti Puumala - Anna Liisa (m)

Bill Douglas - Trilogy: My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home (f)

DIALECT - Gowanus Drifts (m)

Robert Enrico - Au coeur de la vie (f)

Kara-lis Coverdale & LXV - Sirens (m)

Uljana Wolf - i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where (b)

Mempo Giardinelli - Sultry Moon (b)

Jean-Marie Straub - Dialogue d'ombres (f)

Klaus Hoffer - Among the Bieresch (b)

Maxim Biller - U glavi Brune Schulza (b)

Svend Åge Madsen - Days with Diam + Virtue & Vice in the Middle Time (b)